Palm Pre
Palm has announced their new product, the Palm Pre. I watched the press release and I must say it is very cool. It is the first smart phone I’ve seen since the iPhone that I feel has a good chance of being an iPhone killer. I’ve talked about the shortcomings of the iPhone myself. Some of them were solved when the iPhone 3G was released. The Pre has stereo bluetooth audio, something I’ve been wanting. It also has sync capabilities with the Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts. Right now I use a combination of Mobile Me and Spanning Sync to achieve this. It has a slide out physical qwerty keyboard. I’ve loved the virtual keyboard on the iPhone since it came out. In fact I’m willing to wager that I can type just as fast on it as a power user can on their physical keyboard.
The Pre has a removable battery. It has a 3MP digital camera with a flash. It’s also got GPS, WiFi, and 3G. One thing they have done right with the Pre is making it possible to do multiple tasks at once. I can start writing an email message and if I think I need to go back and read another, then I can switch to the mailbox easily and get what I need, then switch back to the email I was writing without losing any info. It’s all very intuitive.
I think that this phone will be the first real threat to the iPhone. It has everything the iPhone has and then some. I’d like to see how it manages your music library. I’m pretty happy with iTunes and it will need some way that can easily copy those songs in iTunes to the Pre.
One thing that really interests me is their partners. If you watch the Palm press release, you’ll see the list of partners they’ve been working with. Sprint is the exclusive carrier, which is fine. Their 3G network is really good. It was seeing Telenav as a partner that really interested me. One thing I’d love on my iPhone is turn-by-turn navigation. Unfortunately, the iPhone SDK prohibits such a feature. I’m guessing apple doesn’t want to get sued when someone follows the directions and turns onto a train track and gets killed. But it looks like the Pre will have turn-by-turn navigation powered by Telenav. I just hope it doesn’t cost extra.
Also, all their applications are developed using HTML, CSS, or Java. So there will be thousands of developers out there who can write software for the Pre.
All in all, the Pre looks very nice and very well done. It may be the new life that both Sprint and Palm have needed for a long time. It will be interesting to see it when it comes out and how it stacks up in everyday use with the iPhone, Blackberry, et al.
